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Ask Father

Why is this man given free rein in the Church?
The answer is in the Third Secret of Fatima.

by Christopher A. Ferrara
September 12, 2017

As I have already shown on these pages, behind Father James Martin’s treacly grin is a cunning subversive on a mission to overturn, if it were possible, the Church’s infallible teaching, rooted in the divine and natural law, that homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity, … [as] tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’…; Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

On and on Father Martin goes, preaching the lie that homosexual acts are not only not depraved, but on the contrary are genuine expressions of what he calls “love.” Martin even dared to proclaim openly during a conference at Fordham University (my alma mater) that there is nothing wrong with the depraved acts performed by his homosexual friend “Mark” and that he professes not to understand how “even the most traditionalist, homophobic, closed-minded Catholic cannot look at my friend and say: that is a loving act...”

As Scripture makes clear, the irreproachable Justice of God recognizes the sin of Sodom as one of the four sins that “cry out” to Heaven for divine retribution, along with murder, the oppression of widows and orphans, and cheating workers out of their just wages. (Cf. Gen. 4:10; Gen. 18:20-21; Exod. 21-23;Deut. 24:14-15). Of course, these sins may be forgiven by the merciful God through the ministry of the Church. Nor does the Church teach hatred of those who commit such sins, but on the contrary her perennial counsel is “hate the sin, love the sinner.”

But forgiveness is not possible without repentance and a resolution to sin no more. Martin, on the other hand, denies the need for repentance and teaches that intrinsically depraved homosexual acts are good. This is simply monstrous. And yet not only does he get away with it, day in and day out, he has even been given a promotion to the status of a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Even Protestant evangelicals have recognized the threat of militant homosexualism Martin represents and have issued the now-famous Nashville Statement, which affirms the very truths Martin is busily undermining and denies the very lies he is promoting with impunity in the Church. To quote some pertinent portions of the Statement:

WE AFFIRM that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife, and is meant to signify the covenant love between Christ and his bride the church.

WE DENY that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship. We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract rather than a covenant made before God.

WE AFFIRM that God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage.

WE DENY that any affections, desires, or commitments ever justify sexual intercourse before or outside marriage; nor do they justify any form of sexual immorality….

WE AFFIRM that divinely ordained differences between male and female reflect God’s original creation design and are meant for human good and human flourishing….

WE AFFIRM that the differences between male and female reproductive structures are integral to God’s design for self-conception as male or female….

WE AFFIRM that self-conception as male or female should be defined by God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption as revealed in Scripture.

WE DENY that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption….

WE DENY that sexual attraction for the same sex is part of the natural goodness of God’s original creation, or that it puts a person outside the hope of the gospel.

WE AFFIRM that sin distorts sexual desires by directing them away from the marriage covenant and toward sexual immorality — a distortion that includes both heterosexual and homosexual immorality.

WE DENY that an enduring pattern of desire for sexual immorality justifies sexually immoral behavior….

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree….

WE AFFIRM that the grace of God in Christ enables sinners to forsake transgender self-conceptions and by divine forbearance to accept the God-ordained link between one’s biological sex and one’s self-conception as male or female.

WE DENY that the grace of God in Christ sanctions self-conceptions that are at odds with God’s revealed will….

Martin, not surprisingly, has been given a featured Op-Ed page in The Washington Post, which purports to “answer” the Nashville Statement with a series of smarmy, sanctimonious comments that avoid the questions of right and wrong Martin labors to obscure. The Post knows a good Modernist subversive when it sees one.

It is a terrible time for the Church when Protestants rise up to defend moral truths about which the generality of Catholic churchmen have fallen silent while the likes of Martin busily subvert them without the least hindrance from Church authorities. What explains this astounding debacle? Pope Benedict XVI gave us the answer more than seven years ago when he spoke of that part of the Third Secret not at all depicted in the vision published in 2000:

“Consequently, I would say that, here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering of the Pope, which we can in the first place refer to Pope John Paul II, an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident….

“As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. Forgiveness does not replace justice.”

Proving once again that the prophetic content of the Message of Fatima — including the whole of the Third Secret, which we have yet to see — is crucial to any understanding of the unparalleled ecclesial crisis of our time.